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Huawei: We welcome security scrutiny

Chinese technology giant Huawei has said that it welcomes the
scrutiny that it has experienced over the past couple of years -
and that it in fact has helped the business maintain a
competitive edge in research and development.

Speaking today from Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen, China,
chief marketing officer for the Wireless Network product line, Dr
Yuefeng Zhou, said: "Facing strict scrutiny as a vendor is
actually something that we are glad of. Because rapid innovation
or improvement for an R&D intensive team would be impossible
without external stress.

"We in particular welcome the discussions or stresses that are
based on fact and driven by technological responsibility.
However, groundless suspicion or conjecture on one hand would be
unfair for us, and on the other hand not helpful for the telecom
sector's future with respect to 5G development," he told
Computerworld UK when asked about the subject.

The company, which has found itself at the centre of accusations
led by the United States, but also by intelligence figures in
Britain, said it is currently in "phase one" of its plan for 5G -
providing the same kind of enhanced mobile broadband (or eMBB)
that connect industrial systems and consumer devices.

Next it wants to provide the kind of "ultra reliable low latency"
usually associated with 5G, which will allow operators to offer
critical functionality at the edge of networks, enabling use
cases like autonomous vehicles, for example.

5G development

In an opening presentation, Dr Zhou noted that Huawei currently
has 30 commercial 5G contracts and that there are 25,000 base
stations shipped. The company provides connectivity at the
"highest" locations, namely Mt Everest at 6,500 kilometres, and
the lowest, such as the Caribbean Sea Bed at 2,900 kilometres
below the sea.

As nice as these figures are, the elephant in the room was
clearly the recent controversies targeted at Huawei - such as
fears in Australia that the company will be a risk to national
security.

However, Zhou looked to draw a line from the development of 2G,
3G and 4G to 5G networks today - saying that they are essentially
built on technologies that forked from those legacy systems, and
that a base station is still a base station. So the 5G fears are
an overestimation, he said.

He added that security has always been at the top of the agenda
for the telecommunications industry in general - from 2G through
to today.

"There are two important aspects that we perceive from past
experiences," Zhou said, during a media roundtable. First is a
standardisation of security requirements, so that everyone from
vendors to operators and governments have "solid ground" to
evaluate "whether or not parts of different vendors are safe."

By fostering cross-industry cooperation on these 5G security
standards - both international and regional - all the
stakeholders will have a firm footing to know what they need to
adhere to.

The NCSC

The National Crime Security Centre, or NCSC, is Britain's
centralised cyber security organisation. It provides advice to
businesses operating in Britain, as well as functioning as a
crime-fighting wing of the government, with GCHQ as its parent
organisation.

The NCSC, Zhou said, has done a lot of work for setting regional
security standards - and it can "serve as an example in other
countries in setting security requirements".

"Recently we have noted that Germany and the EU as a whole has
been discussing standardising security requirements so as to
provide a solid foundation for a security evaluation," Zhou said.
"We believe this is sound progress."

He added that an "open and transparent cooperation mechanism and
platform" would also be useful for flagging technological
problems in 5G.

"As technology progresses and applications diversify we need such
an open and transparent cooperation mechanism for us to be able
to identify and rapidly solve problems," Zhou said.

"Therefore, Huawei would be glad to see progress being found in
such a cooperation mechanism...because in that way we prevent
problems from flowing to the operators and end consumers."

Huawei and Britain have had a long history of collaboration -
with the company opening a cyber security centre in Banbury,
Oxfordshire, which was designed to allay fears that the business
might be a tool of espionage or other threats to national
security. It invited independent experts to test Huawei gear,
including major names in British industry.

When asked if the politicising of technologies could be a more
overt problem in the future, Zhou said: "This entire telecoms
sector has always taken telecoms security issues seriously -
R&D investment in the 5G era can be described as better than
that in the 4G era.

"There is no change in nature, solely from a technical
perspective," he added. "If there is really a change that we have
perceived, that is that Huawei is really starting to gain
leadership in the 5G era."

He added, cryptically, that this leadership in 5G "may cause
over-concern from certain parties".